Alex Taylor holds a Texas flag that will be sent to Pope Francis as part of the student campaign to get him to speak at the school’s 2015 graduation.

(Staff photo by MEREDITH SHAMBURGER - neighborsgo)

University of Dallas students (from left) Colin MacNamara, Olivia Close, Monica King and Madeline Pelletier visited St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City in Rome during a trip in October.

(Photo submitted by ALEX TAYLOR)

University of Dallas students spell out “Franciscus” in honor of Pope Francis. Students at the university are starting a campaign to have the Catholic leader to speak at their 2015 commencement.

(Photo submitted by ALEX TAYLOR)

University of Dallas student Alex Taylor had an idea while sitting around a campfire over spring break. What if Pope Francis spoke at his graduation next year?

Taylor was “half kidding,” he said, but the idea quickly snowballed into a possibility when he returned to school and started talking to other students. After all, Pope Francis would be traveling in the U.S. at that same time.

Now a group of students, Taylor included, have spearheaded efforts to get His Holiness to come speak at the Irving school.

“We just kind of realized that it was a definite possibility, considering our connections at the university,” junior Alexandra Doucet said. “So we sat down and starting trying to figure out ‘How can we make this happen? How can we get his attention?’ ”

As part of that effort, the group has started a social media campaign around the #popefrancisatUD hashtag, and their Facebook group has garnered more than 765 supporters and another 2,300 invited supporters. Several juniors are leading the efforts: Taylor, Doucet, Brie Pajak, Candace Langsfeld, Ada Thomas and Michael Kalan.

Students have also started collecting letters from students, faculty, staff and the surrounding Catholic community. The idea is to get support from everyone in the Catholic community because a visit from Pope Francis wouldn’t just be an honor for the Catholic liberal arts university.

Langsfeld said they’ve already got stacks of letters to send to the pope. Some letters are even coming from places like El Paso through student connections with religious orders.

“What we wanted to do is have a steady trickle into the Vatican Post Office,” she said.

Students have also gathered signatures on a Texas flag; it’s another item they hope to send to the pope to get his attention. Taylor said everyone was pitching in, including teachers and custodial staff — even University of Dallas President Thomas Keefe, who was the first person to sign the flag.

The group also plans to send Pope Francis a photo of more than 100 students spelling out “Franciscus” with their bodies. It was taken two weeks ago and was a “really amazing” effort, Taylor said.

“So two weeks before finals, that many people were into this, and they would come out and take almost an hour to make that a reality,” he said.

One of the many reasons why students are optimistic in their quest is the University of Dallas’s Rome program. The school has its own campus in Rome, and for more than 40 years, the school has hosted a Rome Program.

Some of the students who will graduate next year were sophomores studying in Rome when Pope Francis was elected, and the group went to St. Peter’s Square to watch history unfolding.

“A lot of us were there when the pope was elected,” Thomas said. “So we were thinking it was a very special connection for us. Plus, he’s so personable. He’s been known to call people, to get off the popemobile in St. Peter’s Square. We thought ‘Why not? It could work.’”

Thomas says even if Pope Francis doesn’t speak at next year’s commencement, the group hopes he’ll acknowledge their efforts in some way. Even a letter would be meaningful.

“It really started out with ‘Oh, we want him as our commencement speaker,’ but I think it grew when we realized if he did what the implications of that would be. The great support that that would give,” she said.

Taylor says he wants to bring Pope Francis to the school because he “represents kind of a mode for Christian virtue that all of us aspire to,” he said.

“Having him here would really just kind of inspire our whole class to live the way he’s trying to get us to live, which is really the spirit of the gospel,” Taylor said. “I think that it also gives such an acknowledgment to the university and Catholic education in America, which I think is really important in our day and age.”

Irving/Coppell neighborsgo editor Meredith Shamburger can be reached at 214-977-8292.

THE CAMPAIGN

Students at the University of Dallas are working to get Pope Francis to speak at the school’s 2015 commencement, which will take place May 17, 2015. Students have started gathering letters to send to the Vatican, talking with other Catholic religious institutions and soliciting support on social media through the #popefrancisatUD hashtag. For more information, visit the “Pope Francis @ University of Dallas” event page on Facebook.

SEND A LETTER

Letters encouraging Pope Francis to visit the University of Dallas in 2015 can be sent directly to His Holiness Pope Francis, 00120 Città del Vaticano, Rome, Italy.